Advanced Language Construction

This is the point at which you begin to wonder whether you might have gone too far. /The Language Construction Kit/ is indispensable; this book is, in a way, very dispensable indeed.

But that's sort of the point: this is the periphery of conlanging, dealing with highly unusual grammatical features, creoles and pidgins, that sort of thing. But there are things in here that you'll probably need, and even the rest will probably inspire some good ideas.

One unfortunate thing about this book is that by the time you get here, you've probably already made your big conlanging decisions, and it would be problematic to go back and start revising to incorporate some of the novel ideas incorporated here. So it might be better to read both books show more before setting pen to paper in earnest...

(And a final sidenote: the author laments that he missed the chance to name this book /The Language Construction Kaboodle/. Perhaps some future edition can use that genuinely, hilariously apt name...?) show less

Read this in a day after it arrived. The original Language Construction Kit, originally an online article, was a mainstay of my teenage years, when I was into conlanging originally. I remember printing it out at school but at 4-point type to save paper. The older LCK book was basically the online article but fleshed out. This is all-new material. Rosenfelder writes well and includes plenty of real-world examples for the linguistic constructions he mentions in the book. There is a "guest chapter" by another author near the end, about North Caucasian languages, but unfortunately it is difficult to follow compared to the rest of the book.